re of Jamaica against the attacks of the radical
press.[41]

Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art. Carlyle
had early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age,
and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and
life.[42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons. As a
lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products. As a
student of art, he mourned over the reduction of the handicraftsman to a
slave of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English sky with their
smoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with their
refuse. The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. He
would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those in
England, and pull down the city of New York. He could not live in
America two months--a country without castles. Modern architecture,
modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterly
hideous. Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned by
competitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by division
of labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. Work
without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take pleasure in his work,
said Morris, is the workman's best inducement to labour and his truest
reward. In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of the
Middle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer and the
handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal,
and of the latter merely mechanical.

This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on "The Nature of
Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice," which made so deep an impression on
Morris when he was in residence at Oxford.[43] "It is verily this
degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other
evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into
vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they
cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against
wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the
pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and
have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet
shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but that
they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and
therefore look